Facts from Israel.
News, strategic reports, assessments, opinion, facts, information.
All you need to understand and report on Israel in a wider world.

Sunday, 21 May 2017

BETHLEHEM, THE CAPITAL OF PALESTINE.

With President
Trump’s visit to Jerusalem and then Bethlehem, it set me thinking about these
places and Palestinian demands for a capital of a non-existent state. Bethlehem
is the place that Trump met Abbas, the capital-demanding Palestinian leader. This set me off on a rant…

The world is myopic if not deranged, in declaring
Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple site Islamic and that the Kotel, the western
retaining wall supporting the Temple Mount built by Jewish kings and recaptured
from Jordan fifty years ago on June 7 in a defensive war forced onto Israel by
aggressive Arab armies bent on our destruction, as not being part of Israeli
territory.

So what is this nonsense that Mahmoud Abbas demands that
Jerusalem should be his capital and that Israel cannot claim Jerusalem as the
capital of the Jewish State? He seems to
have much global support.

I have a solution to the impasse. Let them call Bethlehem
their capital. After all, they invest political capital in telling the world
how much they care for Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus who they call “a
Palestinian messenger.”

What a strong message this would send to the world. They
claim to care so much for Christianity even as the Christian population of that
town shrinks from an overwhelming majority in 1995 when Israel gifted Bethlehem
to Yasser Arafat in a peace gesture. Today, the Christians are less than 12%.

To readers who know me, including my many Christian friends,
and think I’ve suddenly lost the plot, I ask you to relax. This article is as
fanciful as the notion that a two-state solution will herald peace between the
Palestinians and Israel. So let’s face some painful truths together.

They say that the cause of this Christian flight from
Bethlehem is the oppressive Israeli security barrier that ruins lives, but
isn’t it strange that as the Christian population has rapidly reduced,

exponentially, the Muslim population has rapidly grown.
Is this the anti-Christian security barrier they make it out to be?
Actually not. According the Israeli statistics, the Bethlehem population has
grown from 14,439 in 1967 to over 27,000 today. It’s only the demographics that
have changed. Far less Christians, far more Muslims, and far more radical Hamas
influence.

As veteran Ha’Aretz journalist, Danny Rubenstein, who has
studied Palestinians for over forty
years, wrote;

“Arab nationality in general, and specifically
Palestinian nationalism, has become more and more of a religious thing,” meaning
traditionally Muslim. This is what we witness being playing out in Jerusalem
where Palestinian demands are targeted
not for peace but to drive Jews away from their holy sites and heritage.

Journalists Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff described in their book ‘The Seventh War;
How We Won and Why We Lost the War’ how armed gangs of street thugs along
with terrorists threatened Bethlehem Christians, took over their homes and
businesses when they fled, as Palestinian officials turned a blind eye to the
violence and theft and ignored Christian complaints.

They even don Father Christmas costumes to disguise themselves as they carry out their violence.

Today, Hamas is strong in Bethlehem. Municipal elections
were suspended in September 2016, over concerns that Hamas would gain an
overall majority. The international community should be concerned that a
once-strongly Christian town has become a Hamas stronghold. Yet it also turns a
blind eye to this abuse of a once Christian Bethlehem.

Bethlehem is a metaphor for Palestinian deceptions and violence.

Bethlehem - the capital of Palestine. Let’s make an issue of
it. Let’s see if the Christian world will accept their most holy place turned
into the capital of those who see themselves as the spearhead of the Islamic
world. If they do, it would be a universal expression of the failed policy of turning
the other cheek. Personally, I don’t think they care enough about it. They were
as silent and as impotent over the loss of their Christian heritage in
Jerusalem when UNESCO, at the behest of the Muslim world, converted the Jewish
Temple into an exclusively Islamic holy shrine, as they have been over the
massed slaughter of Christians in the Muslim Middle East.

I am sure they would go for Bethlehem as the capital of
Palestine. The only political effort I have seen is the sight of replacement
theologians gathering in Bethlehem annually for their “Christ at the
Checkpoint” political pantomime, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this
place is now in the hands of Islamic Hamas. These delusional pastors hate
Israel so much they remain silent to the Christian exodus perverting it to a ‘Blame
Israel” campaign. They would surely sanctify Bethlehem becoming the
crowning glory of the Palestinian throne.

In my research for the Israel Institute for Strategic
Studies it is crystal clear to me that, by the ballot or by the bullet, Hamas will
usurp power in any Palestinian state with the same bullying tactics that have
given them control of Bethlehem. This would make any gesture of allowing them
to claim Jerusalem as their capital a gift from hell and a poisoned thorn in
the weakened side of Israel.

Anyone in their right mind knows that a Palestinian state
would destabilise into a Greater Hamastan that would not only threaten a shrunken
Israel, it would make the Hashemite kingdom across the River Jordan even
shakier than it is today.

With eighty percent of Jordan’s population claiming to be
Palestinian, a vulnerable Israel would be in no position to prevent the
overthrow of the king in a popular uprising in Jordan. In
such an event, the Palestinians could claim Amman as yet another trophy
capital. Black September, anyone?

It is fair to ask how many capitals the Palestinians need?
They have two already with Hamas, who consider themselves the true leaders of
the Palestinian cause, firmly based in Gaza City, and the undemocratic
Palestinian Authority tentatively holding power in Ramallah where their
political administration is based and where their founding hero, Yasser Arafat,
is buried.

So why do they need a third capital? Basically, it is to
herald a powerful message of conquest, that Muslim metaphor, that ancient
Islamic tradition. Conquest of the seat of another religion, another nation,
such as the Ummiyad conquest of early
Spain, a conquest that lasted for eight hundred years, and the attempt by
Suleiman to conquer Vienna in 1529.

Following the conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 by Saladin, see
where they perched their mosque, directly over the ruins of the Jewish Temple.

President Trump visited the Western Wall, the site of the
Jewish Temple, and then talked with Mahmoud Abbas about tolerance and peace, it
is worth recalling Abbas’s recent words about Jewish “filthy feet”
defiling holy places in Jerusalem, places which Jews have nurtured with love for all faiths while maintaining the freedom of worship banned by the Palestinian Authority
and the Muslim wakf to Jews on the Temple Mount.

It’s also worth recalling that, in the aftermath of the
destruction of the World Trade Center by Muslim terrorists on 9/11, it was
proposed to build a mosque on the ruins of the Twin Towers. Some said then it would be an act of “tolerance”
to allow them to do it.

Perhaps the same sense of “tolerance” should apply
by allowing the Palestinians reinter the remains of their founder and
arch-terrorist, Yasser Arafat, in Manger Square next to the Church of the
Nativity.

So let’s continue to promote Bethlehem as the Palestinian
capital. It makes as much sense as insisting that Jerusalem is theirs.

Barry
Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for
Strategic Studies.

He is the
author of the new best-selling book ‘1917. From Palestine to the Land of
Israel.’